“Does everyone hate stairs around here?” she muttered as they glided upward.
“No,” the woman said. “We just hate redundancy. Stairs are nice for making entrances and filling out atriums, but as for getting from one level to the next, Ironflight is so much easier.”
At the landing there was a door of golden metal, like the ones in front of Dr. Mumble’s office and the entrance to the Laboratory, but the woman didn’t have to put her hand to it or say her name. Instead, it opened on its own. The tower room was soft and painted sky-blue and smelled faintly of fresh cotton, as if it were a sundress hung out to dry on a warm summer day. A bed that looked just like the one Zanna had back home stood in the center, and her entire body ached to crawl in and curl up and perhaps cry a little before she fell asleep. But Zanna forced herself to keep looking around, at least until the woman left her alone. Part of the room was sectioned off by a privacy curtain, and when Zanna peeked behind it, she saw a shower, toilet, and sink, along with a cabinet stocked with the necessary toiletries. The woman had even included a desk in front of the large, singular window that looked out over the mansion’s rooftops.
“I hope you like it,” she said as Zanna moved around the prison.
Zanna’s feet throbbed with each step, and she did her best not to let it show on her face.
“I made it with you in mind. The books are a selection that I think you’ll find quite interesting. And when you’re done with those, I have an extensive library downstairs. I can show you it tomorrow.”
Zanna ran a hand over the desk and crouched at the bookshelf to read the spines. She didn’t recognize any of the titles. Again, the bed called out to her, but her captor was still in the room, watching Zanna’s every move with appraising eyes.
“I do want you to be happy,” the woman said after a while. Her voice sounded like she was far older than the alien beauty of her face indicated. “I’m not cruel, Zanna. I would have been content letting you live as you please, free to do whatever you wanted, if you had just signed that contract as I asked you to in the first place and stayed away from St. Pommeroy’s. This is your choice. This is what you forced me to do. But that doesn’t mean it has to be unpleasant. It doesn’t mean we can’t make the best of it.”
Her hand made a cautious movement, a little turn from her side, up to offer it to Zanna. As if Zanna would grip it and pump it enthusiastically and say, “Thanks for imprisoning me. I really appreciate it.”
Zanna just scowled, and the woman sighed, raising her hand to brush a stray wisp of hair out of her eyes. “Very well. I will see you in the morning. Good night.”
The door snapped shut behind her.
Zanna knew the first thing she should do was scour the entire room for cracks and weaknesses—anything that would help her escape. But too much had happened that day. She pressed her face to the window and looked out toward the forest, searching for anything that would tell her where she had been taken. The pine forest went on for miles and miles. There was nothing else around her. Only trees and snow and a dance of aurora borealis on the horizon. Zanna bit her tongue and cursed herself for not having been able to keep her eyes open on the flight. Nora would have been watching coastlines and geographic formations, gathering as much information as she could. Perhaps that was why Zanna’s kidnapper had flown so high in the first place. She knew Zanna wouldn’t be able to look down.
There would be time for all this and more, Zanna thought as she began undressing for bed. She wouldn’t be making a break for it tonight, but eventually, her captor would make a mistake. The woman would overlook something or accidentally leave a door open, and Zanna would pounce on it. It was a puzzle, and if Zanna was good at anything, it was figuring out puzzles.
Repeating that thought to herself, she curled up beneath the blankets and didn’t cry at all.
In the morning she awoke to a bell ringing somewhere nearby, though she couldn’t figure out from where. Half an hour later, after she had showered and found fresh clothes in her wardrobe, the woman appeared at the door to bring Zanna down to breakfast.
“Scrambled, with ketchup and toast?” the woman asked as the silver serving tray floated around the table and presented Zanna with a steaming plate of eggs. “Or have your tastes changed?”
Zanna wanted to knock the tray over, but skipping dinner last night had left her stomach growling. The food was hot, and though she wouldn’t admit it, her kidnapper was right. Scrambled eggs with ketchup and toast were one of Zanna’s favorites.
A pitcher floated over and filled her glass with orange juice. They ate in a long dining hall filled with torn and faded portraits that the woman had waved a hand dismissively at when they had first come in. “Art was never really my forte. One of these days, I’ll find something to replace them with.”
Zanna watched the pitcher refill the woman’s glass and then duck back into the kitchen. She could hear the clatter of metal and running water behind the door, but she hadn’t seen anyone else in the house besides her solitary captor. Either the chef was exceptionally good at hiding, or the entire kitchen had been automated.
“Did you build the kitchen yourself?” Zanna asked.
The woman laughed. She was having the same thing as Zanna—scrambled eggs covered in ketchup with toast on the side—and dabbed away a stray bit at the corner of her mouth. “You’ve noticed! It was quite a bit of work, but in the end, I think it was worth it. No more chopping onions and scrubbing dishes here. Just ask, and poof! It’s marvelous.”
Zanna finished her breakfast, quietly scoping out the dining room and looking for avenues of possible escape, and the silver serving tray returned to take away the dirty dishes. As it passed her, she tried to nonchalantly peer into its functions, hoping the woman would think she was just admiring the craftsmanship. But when she did, all she could see were numbers. Enormous, senseless numbers. As if someone had given a calculator to a monkey and told it to pound away to its heart’s content. They moved and scrolled like the functions Zanna knew, but whether they were coordinates or gravity or something else entirely, she couldn’t say.
The woman finished her last bite of toast, a smile on her face. “And what are you doing?”
“Just looking.” Zanna pulled herself out of the unreadable functions and touched the tray’s decorated edge. “It’s very nice. Antique?”
“It’s primelocked,” the woman said, apparently not fooled at all by Zanna’s charade. “The entire house is.”
Zanna tipped her head a little to the side.
“But of course you don’t know what that is,” her captor said. “So let me tell you. I have primelocked this house from the tip of its weathervane down to its subterranean plumbing. It’s a tricky little business, relying on the fact that two large primes can be easily multiplied together, but undoing that—factoring that product—is exceedingly difficult. To those with the original two prime keys, manipulation is easy.” As if to demonstrate, the tray of dirty dishes folded up into an origami crane on a bed of lotus blossoms. “But to everyone else, it is impossible. If you had a supercomputer tucked away, you might be able to factor it out in six or seven hundred years. Since I very much doubt you do, there is only one way out of here.” She laid a hand on her chest and grinned. “Through me. And you will not get the keys from me. You are not nearly clever enough for that.”
The silver serving tray scuttled around the table, back to its original form, and the woman laid her dishes on it. “But really, why would you want to leave? Everything you could want is here. Come. I’ll show you the library. Perhaps that will change your mind.”
They went out of the dining room and down the hallway to a set of doors upholstered in rich brown leather with polished brass buttons and tacks around the edges. Somewhere out there, a law firm was missing its front doors. Her kidnapper gestured grandly, and the doors threw themselves open.
A delicious, musty scent roll
ed out, carrying a mixture of spiderwebs and yellowed parchment and leather bindings and gold lettering. Dim light filled the library, even though the only source Zanna saw was a beam of red sunlight streaming through a high circular window in the back. It fell directly onto a comfortable nook of plump chairs and sofas. On the wall behind the sofas, a brittle, yellowing map of the world had been framed, the unexplored waters labeled simply HERE BE DRAGONS. Books overflowed the shelves and piled up in the corners, on the tables—anywhere there was space. Its lack of organization would have thrown any librarian into a fit, but for Zanna, it was lovely.
“What do you think?” the woman asked in a hushed tone as Zanna experimentally sunk her hand into one of the pillows. “I’ve got fiction books, encyclopedias, puzzle books—whatever you like. And if it’s not here, I’ll go find it for you. Just say the word.”
Zanna gave the antique globe on the desk a spin, wondering which of the continents she was on now. Europe? North America? Asia? “This is an illusion.”
The woman laughed. “Why would you think that? Is it that hard to believe?”
“Nobody has libraries like this,” Zanna said. “Not unless you’re some English lord. It’s too . . .” She almost said perfect but stopped in time. “Too much.”
“It’s not too much for you,” the woman said, trying that friendly smile again. “And yes, I admit there have been a few touches here and there. I had to pretty up the sunlight a little—seasonal changes, you understand. Shorter days and less light. And a few controls to keep the temperature and humidity in check. But the books are real. The room is real. It is my gift to you. Because I do want us to get along. We don’t have to be enemies.”
She held her hand out to Zanna, indicating both the library and her peaceful intentions in one compound gesture, and Zanna’s own hand twitched a little, acting on reflex. But then she remembered what had happened at the party—the unconscious bodies of her friends and Pops in his cage—and she made her hands into fists.
“If you want us to get along, then leave me alone.”
The woman dropped her hand. “I can’t do that,” she said. For a second it looked as if she was going to launch into an explanation, but instead, she just rubbed at her eyes. “It’s complicated. Everything is complicated.”
“Then try me,” Zanna said. “I’m not stupid.”
That made the woman laugh—not wickedly, but with a good nature. “I know,” she said. “Believe me, I know. But I can’t. Half of me hopes that one day you might understand and perhaps reconsider your hatred . . . and the other half hopes that day will never come. Just know that this is important. I have my reasons, and they are good. They are so very good.”
She held out her hand again, but when Zanna still refused, the woman lowered it, her face hardening into its mask of unblemished and unearthly skin. “As you wish. I have business to attend to. I’m going to lock you in here. Prove that you’re a good girl and don’t make too much trouble, and I might let you wander around the house eventually. Until then”—she gestured to the books—“enjoy.”
The woman backed out of the library, and the doors shut with a click. Silence wrapped around Zanna. With nothing else to do, she wandered through the shelves and clutter, taking her time to read every title. Her kidnapper had been telling the truth when she had said there was quite the selection to choose from. But one topic was absent: Science. It was a hole in the otherwise comprehensive library, and Zanna guessed that its omission was not an accident. The woman had been trying to prevent Zanna from attending St. Pommeroy’s the first day they had met. This was just the next logical step.
Her captor had been thorough, but she hadn’t thought of everything. Zanna went to the shelf with the encyclopedias and took down Poland–Python, intending to see what the entry on prime numbers said about factoring their products. But all those thoughts flew out of her head as soon as she opened the inner cover of the book. Someone had owned the book before her, and they had written their claim at the top of the page in a familiar unkempt handwriting.
Mine!
Chapter Thirteen
In the days after her kidnapping, Zanna jumped at every stray sound in the house, expecting the Primers to come bursting through the door to rescue her at any moment. But as days became weeks, her hopes dwindled. After all, the Primers had been looking for her kidnapper since Zanna’s first day at St. Pommeroy’s, and look how well that had turned out. And if the Primers couldn’t help her, there didn’t seem to be much hope that her friends and grandfather would fare any better. No, Zanna realized as she read through every book in the cluttered library, looking for anything that might help her plans for freedom. Her best hope—her only hope—was to escape on her own.
So she played along with her kidnapper’s hospitality. After a few weeks of good behavior, Zanna was allowed out of the library during the day while the woman went off to attend to some mysterious business she wouldn’t talk about, and Zanna wandered through the corridors with pen and paper in hand, looking for weaknesses and mapping out her prison. Besides the sitting room, dining room, kitchen, and library, there was a dusty office; a couple of spare bedrooms and bathrooms down a narrow hallway that might have once housed servants; a laundry room; a greenhouse full of broken clay pots; and a second, darker sitting room. Zanna didn’t care much for the last room because it had a stuffed moose head with creepy glass eyes mounted on the wall. She tried climbing through its fireplace and up the chimney to freedom, but half an hour later, she was just ashy and sweaty and had discovered that the top of the chimney had been welded shut.
She tried all the doors and windows. In fact, on the first day she had been left alone in the library, she had climbed up to the high circular window that the illusionary sunlight came through and had bashed on the glass with her shoe. But none of the windows could be broken. Either the woman had done something to the functions of the glass so it was as strong as steel, or it was some other material entirely, made transparent by illusions or chemical manipulation or a combination of both. Zanna didn’t know—the primelock hid everything beneath its impenetrable wall of numbers. All she knew was that the windows wouldn’t break, and the doors couldn’t be forced. Even when she vented her frustration with one of the heavy wood side tables from the sitting room and swung it with all her strength, the windows didn’t budge.
There was another mystery Zanna discovered after a few days, while she was alone, reading about prime numbers, and the rest of the house was dead silent. Softly, through the floorboards, she could hear a whuff-whuff sound, like someone working a furnace bellows. After she was allowed to wander the house, she went around to all the rooms, putting her ear to the floor. Whatever the sound was, it came from the basement.
One day, she tried the basement door, even though she had tried it a hundred times before. Locked. But then, as she looked up and down the hallway, she had an idea and headed off to the kitchen. The woman had arranged it so that if Zanna was hungry, all she had to do was pull one of the bell ropes scattered around the mansion, and the serving tray would appear in a few moments to take her order before whisking off to the kitchen. But the real excitement was watching the kitchen in action. So, oftentimes, Zanna just stole a chair from the dining room, plopped herself down next to the cutting board, and shouted commands to the knives and pots and plates that buzzed around like worker bees, watching as they made her meal.
On this particular day when she entered, the kitchen was still. Her captor had a collection of knives so extensive it would put a restaurant to shame. They ranged from long to short, serrated to blunt, and graceful to brutish. It was the brutish one Zanna wanted today. A meat cleaver with a heavy square blade of steel. A knife made for ruthlessly chopping through things like bone and gristle. And floorboards.
The best spot would be in the abandoned office, Zanna reasoned. There was a dusty rug in the middle of the room that she could use to hide the mess she made. The flo
or was old and creaking. And there was the bonus of not having a creepy moose head looking over her shoulder. The only downside was that the door to the office opened right into the front entrance hall. Her kidnapper might have left her alone for the day, but if the woman returned early, the first thing she would see upon entering would be Zanna attacking the floorboards. Zanna could always close the door, but that would save one, maybe two seconds. She remembered how quickly the house had slammed the front door shut when she tried to make a break for it that first night.
There was no other option than to be quick. Zanna knelt down behind the large desk in the center of the abandoned office and threw back the rug, coughing as a cloud of dust billowed out around her. She had tried hacking at the walls after throwing furniture at the windows, with the same amount of success. But she hadn’t tried the floor. It was possible that the woman had treated the floorboards with the same reinforcing functions she used on the walls—but it was just as possible that they had been overlooked. If they hadn’t, Zanna was out of ideas. Only one way to find out, she thought and then swung the meat cleaver.
It made a satisfying, splitting crack, and Zanna grinned. Overlooked.
A few more swings, and she had a hole big enough to put her fingers through. With the flat of the cleaver, she levered up floorboards until the hole was wide enough for her body to fit through. Beneath the floorboards was a gap for the crossbeams to run and then the ceiling of the cellar. Zanna reached down into the cool, dank space and felt around. It was brick and crumbled a little at her touch. She put the meat cleaver to the side and stood up, lowering her foot into the hole. With a hasty check out the window to see if the coast was still clear, Zanna kicked, and the old mortar begin to crack and shift under her heel. Zanna held tightly to the desk to make sure she wouldn’t lose her balance, and then she kicked again. It broke through with an explosion of dust. For a moment, she held very still with her foot dangling in the black of the cellar, wincing at the sound of loose bricks falling while expecting the woman to appear, demanding to know what all the noise was about. But there was nothing except that mysterious whuff-whuff, slightly louder than before.
The Zanna Function Page 16
